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Bob the Super Hamste writes "The BBC is reporting that surgeons in Sweden have transplanted a synthetic windpipe into a patient. The synthetic windpipe was grown from a scaffolding and coated with the patients own stem cells. The scaffolding was made using 3D images of the patient's own windpipe. The new windpipe was made by scientists in London."

I can't think of what the technical term would be for the things you're citing (cybernetic implants?) but that's not what's being discussed here. One is trying to restore lost functionality by duplicating lost or damaged parts of the body and the other is trying to add entirely new funct

Yeah, that is what I was thinking. But it IS the first windpipe is it not?

The biggest thing to note about growing these "artificial" parts is that if the organ being replaced has a complex vain system, you cannot grow or replace it.
Hopefully this will be resolved in the future so we can live to 150.

Actually it is possible to produce highly vascularized tissue. The trick is to use the decellularized collagen matrix from a donor organ (either taken from an animal or from a cadaver) which can then be re-seeded with the patient's own cells and implanted. Atala's group has done this with livers (although not re-implanted yet) and has made proof-of-concepts with kidneys (by using a stack of 2d tissues rather than attempting to engineer the complete 3d structure)

The difference in this case is the use of stem cells to replace known bad cells. The Atala group used differentiated cells, which is of more limited use when dealing with potentially cancerous organ tissues.

If you RTFA, second sentence:
"The surgery marks the first time a trachea grown from a patient’s stem cells and seeded onto a synthetic, rather than a donor, structure has been transplanted in a human."
and the fifth sentence:
"We talked to Dr. Anthony Atala, a pioneer in the field who in 1999 transplanted the first of several synthetic bladders into young people with bladder disease."

As I write this, the only comments posted so far are the usual sarcastic quips. But this is huge. Beyond huge.

For the first time, an artificially produced cloned organ has been created and transplanted. Someone has received an organ that has zero chance of rejection and will heal to a completely natural state.

I give it less than a decade before more complex organs like hearts or kidneys are transplanted for the first time.

"Emergencies" is open-ended. The patient in TFA had a relatively slow but still dire emergency, and he was helped in a timeframe doctors would consider "lightning speed" - growing a heretofore irreplaceable part in two weeks.

How many people could be treated if a new irreplaceble organ of their own tissue could be made for them in, say, one month's time? The benefits would almost outstrip the imagination.

Actually it might.They can build the structure ahead of time, and then when needed put your cells onto the stricture.

I suspect there will be a time when you can have your critical organ on 'standby'. At my age, I would love to hae a second heart ready to replace my older one. I read a paper where they where discussing the possible of creating a heart this way, and then having it put inside you along with your other heart to take over.

It was high level musing..but high level musing by people that know all the details.

Yeah this is massive. I remember watching a Horizon (BBC) episode on growing hearts from scaffold and stem-cell and having them function. It was beyond amazing. This is exactly where the money needs to go. Growing organs, if it beats graft-vs-host is one of the biggest potential ways forward.

The body doesn't reject titanium, either. I'm not saying this isn't a great thing - it is. But this is grown on a glass scaffolding, which could still serve as a nidus for infection, and it doesn't get us closer to real artificial organs.

Yes but there are other applications that this would be better suited. You could grow new arteries for bypass patients, instead of having to harvest from other parts of the body. That alone would allow people with clogged arteries the ability to be able to do strenuous activity.
Eventually they will be able to do more complex but this is a huge milestone.

Coronary grafts would be especially bad for this, as glass (which is used for the scaffold) has properties that render it highly unsuitable for use as an arterial graft. Arteries are muscular vessels and depend on the elasticity this grants to provide smooth delivery of blood rather than jackhammering it into distal vessels. You'll need a non-rejected elastic substrate that can handle systemic arterial pressures for ten years just to match the statistical performance of vein grafts.

Yes because somehow magically in other countries, citizens don't foot the bill for socialized medicine. If you really think Swedes "don't have to pay for" their health care, you are being seriously naive. Not getting a direct bill for something is not the same thing as not ever paying for it indirectly.

Yeah, but it's a much smaller bill. Turns out that any level of 'government inefficiency' is a drop in the bucket beside the waste of having every company involved take its 50% off the top, plus executive salaries, plus lack of preventative medicine because that is an 'expense'.

Here is an excellent graphic from National Geographic [ngm.com] comparing spending to life expectancy. Despite having worse outcomes than almost every nation on the chart, the US is spending so much more that they had to be placed outside the graph. In fact, most industrialized nations are spending less than half as much as the US for better outcomes. The only countries with worse outcomes are spending less than a quarter as much per person as the US does.

So while the citizens as the United States of America may not be able to afford it, I suspect the rest of the world will do just fine.

And that assumes that this causes a net rise in health costs. My guess is that, when all is said and done, replacing damaged organs will prove much cheaper than long term treatment and complications do now.

Actually, the US has better outcomes for medical care than other nations; lower life expectancy is due to more obesity and heart disease, plus some other factors. Insufficient preventive medicine isn't due to cost or lack of coverage either for most people, it's a choice for most people (a stupid one but still a choice).

And the rest of the world isn't "doing just fine". Most countries in the world can't even spend close to what either the US or Europe are spending.

I give it less than a decade before more complex organs like hearts or kidneys are transplanted for the first time.

Ummm... we've been transplanting hearts and kidneys for decades...

Correct terminology IMO would be implanted. If you transplant a tree you dig it up and move from one spot in the ground to another. The windpipe didn't come from another body it came from the labratory.

This story seemed like a dupe of this one from last year:Child Receives Trachea Grown From Own Stem Cells [slashdot.org]
But it seems that instead of taking a donor trachea and using it for the "scaffold," they built their own, no donor at all.. Pretty amazing.

Someone already brought up the artificially grown bladder, which was covered earlier this year, so this surgery already seems dubious as a "first synthetic organ" transplant. The BBC article title says first synthetic windpipe, but the subtitle says first synthetic organ. I call shenanigans (and suspect a bit of nationalism at work).

However, what about the Jarvik artificial hearts? Those were developed and transplanted years ago. Don't those qualify as synthetic organs, since they are artificial yet per

The Jarvik hearts are not custom-printed to be structurally identical to the patient's, but we can call them synthetic organs. The artificially grown bladders are made from the patient's (already differentiated) cells, but they are not custom printed either (they're bladders, they don't need to be).

These windpipes are both custom printed to match the structure of the patient's original windpipe, and are made with the patient's stem cells.

Yeah, my first reaction to the headline was "Who gives a shit where the surgeon was born?". I have to wonder how this fact, insignificant with respect to the rest of the story, was promoted to the title. "World Ends Today, Starting With Spain" - who cares where it starts?

I've sometimes wondered about this possibility too. I'm no transgender, but I'm human and can empathize with their plight (if not completely understand what they feel). No more need for surgical "hacks" to try to mend nature. This opens the possibility of a streamlined "patch/tweak/upgrade":) I hope you get your own vagina as soon as possible! Also, I hope more complex organs can be made soon too. This thought is purely egotistical: you never know when you'll get a cancer or lose a limb.

This kind of news is absolutely huge for a TG girl.
In a few years time, it might become possible to get a complete vagina/womb/ovaries set even if you were not born a genetic female.
Totally awesome...

Vagina/womb perhaps, but ovaries are a big ask. You should have saved some sperm for later if you wanted children that were genetically your own.

"Professor Paolo Macchiarini from Italy led the pioneering surgery, which took place at the Karolinska University Hospital."

The only reference to Spain I saw:

"Professor Macchiarini already has 10 other windpipe transplants under his belt - most notably the world's first tissue-engineered tracheal transplant in 2008 on 30-year-old Spanish woman Claudia Costillo"

Not to diminish Spanish doctors, just pointing out what I think is an error in the title.

The title of the Slashdot article says Spanish, then in the article is says Swedish then if you click on the actual link it is an Italian professor. I just want some clarification here since it is stating so many different nationalities I want to know who did it so I can get mine.